The Six Five team discusses Adobe Max 2024
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Adobe Max 2024, we both had people down there in, I think it was Miami or Miami area in Florida. I like when events go other places than Vegas and San Francisco. It’s nice to see other parts of the world at times.
Patrick Moorhead: Bestie, I’ll be right back. Hang one sec. Keep going.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. No problem. You do your thing. So, Adobe had their big… Max is the creator event. So, that’s what they focus on at this event. And so, of course in the era of creator or the era of creativity, AI is front and center. So, the company basically was looking at and launching new things. Remember, this is the company that’s got Firefly, the image generation, and I’ll talk more about what they’re launching, but they’ve also had some critics challenge how they’ve built their models. And that was a topic that’ll continue to be a concern as creators have been the bread and butter of Adobe but at the same time, creators are facing the challenge of… Talk about an existential risk. Why do you hire a graphic designer or a creator when you can press a button and generate an image of The Six Five dudes looking great on camera in the moment.
And so, that’s a little bit of what’s going on. So, making technology available, embedding it in their tools, and of course trying to manage the risk is a big focus of what’s going on with Adobe, Pat. Probably the biggest thing they launched was this new Firefly model. This and the video. So, they’ve basically created a new Firefly and generative video is now part of the company’s portfolio. So, the beta model for generative video is in the app. Now, again, this uses a ton of cost, a ton of credit. So, when you’re thinking about generating video… And we saw it with Sora, we’re starting to see it come out other places. Noe, this is going to be a big trend line, Pat, but it’s also going to be expensive and it’s going to be resource intensive. This is why we need all that energy. They’ve got Project Neo, which was launched. This was a new app that allows designers to develop 3D graphics before pushing them to Illustrator. So, just streamlining workflow. You had a new generation of Frame IO, a new gen studio for performance marketing. It’s a little different than the traditional creative stuff, but this is where you tie together the content and the results.
So, they’re trying to help companies figure out more what the outcomes are of the content that’s being placed across the internet. And, then a few other enhancements on things like Lightroom, where you can generatively remove things through text. Like, “Hey, we want to take that out of the picture.” “Pat, I want to take these terrible lights over my head out of this image, take the shine off my already shiny head.” Being able to do that. So, this is kind of a continuation. You and I aren’t super focused day in and day out on the creative stuff, but let’s face it, the ability to create… I mean, Pat, when is a world where we have Agentic Dan and Pat’s that can do podcasts all day long on every new launch because they’re able to use RAG, use fine-tuning, use generative video, and eventually, dude, you and I can be watching races, podcasting at the same time and having our metrics managed because of what companies like Adobe are up to.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. You did a great breakdown on the announcements. One thing I want to reinforce here is that Adobe is the entrenched vendor for creative on the enterprise side and companies like Salesforce are the entrenched vendor on the marketing management. And, what’s really cool about bringing these two together with marketing and creative, it is just such a natural. It’s something that Salesforce just doesn’t bring. And, on the performance marketing part, adding the Gen AI goodies to that and then combining that with what you’re doing with Creative Cloud is a very, very powerful combination.
And, what’s interesting is that something Salesforce doesn’t have is the ability to really have that entire pipeline there. And, creative people, a lot of the times, are put in the position that they have to do marketing. Trust me, I know. I ran a very large corporate marketing group at AMD a while back, and I had funnel management too. I wish I had tools like this that could go one to the other. They did a pretty good job rolling out big customers like Gatorade, Mattel, Oliver, Red Hat, and IBM. They did a big IBM rollout last year. I don’t know if the IBM results are public or not, but they are absolutely astounding at the amount of cost savings that the IBM… It’s an IBM consultant-
Daniel Newman: I believe it is. But, yeah. We won’t overstep. Leave it as public.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. But, it was absolutely astounding. Moving forward, I’m super interested to see when this starts getting into their earnings. Adobe really hasn’t seen a pop from this like you would expect. But, then again, neither as Salesforce, the big Salesforce pop has been around data Cloud as opposed to actually the Gen AI tools. And, when I mean pop, I mean, where it actually impacts the earnings. Same for SAP, Adobe, Salesforce. Probably the biggest company that’s had a pop so far has been ServiceNow, but I don’t know if that’s generative AI or that’s just creeping, being the system of experience across all these enterprise SaaS platforms.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.